Are full casting progression and high tier characters overrated?

[NeoPhoenix0]

tier does not equal power. tier is closer to an average to somewhat knowledgeable player's ability to be versatile with that class without considering prestige classes and some class variants.

above level 10 and especially above level 15 tier 1 casters can do pretty much anything and be at least good at it. below level 10 and especially below level 5 what a caster can do and what a caster can do well are much more limited. however at those levels they are still tier 1 and the fighter still in the tier 5 maybe tier 4 area. the fighter will win you the encounter cause he is good at his job and his job is what get the thing done at low levels but the wizard can still do more variety of things even at that low level including using spells to skill monkey or replace the need for skill monkying, do damage to groups of enemies, crowd control with spells such as web, glitterdust or entangle, and a litany of other things that might not be overly powerful by themselves but are extremely varied and powerful when applied correctly and generally make a tier 1-2 caster useful in pretty much any situation if he has a decent toolbelt of spells. he just generally isn't as good as a class that is specific and specialized would be until he can get more torque from higher level spells and such.

so to answer the question, full casting classes may be overrated but if that is the case it is cause a people misinterpret that the tier system set out to accomplish in the first place. as evidenced by the myriad of repeated threads that talk about it.

edit: also full casters at low level are often (but not always) best at making others significantly better at the thing they are already good at.